ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the latent philosophical implications of the problem of preservation. It proposes that an investigation of these implications can not only enrich the philosophical discourse but can also inform a critical technical practice, which manifests itself as a critical conservation practice. In the mid-2000s, media archaeology emerged as an academic field, adding the media-philosophical considerations of F. A. Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, J. Parikka, E. Huhtamo, Wolfgang Ernst, Kirschenbaum, and others to the pragmatic reasons for preservation brought forward by museums and collections. Hardware description languages are Turing-complete formal languages that can be used to describe discrete electronic circuits as ‘programs’. The chapter investigates hardware description languages and programmable logic devices as possible preservation media. When museums started to exhibit culturally significant computational objects in the late 1970s, two major problems became immediately apparent: the problem of preservation and the problem of display.
